Wall-climbing robot suitable for space missions

One of the robot's six feet, which has six degrees of freedom and is operated by a detaching motor cam with infrared sensor

A microscopic view of the robot's foot pad

The robot is able to transition from vertical to horizontal surfaces

Gecko-inspired robots could soon be crawling across the hulls of spacecraft after European Space Agency (ESA) research found their adhesive feet would work in space.

Engineers from Simon Fraser University in Canada have previously demonstrated ‘dry adhesive’ materials with a family of ‘Abigaille’ crawling robots inspired by a gecko’s feet.

The lizards feet are sticky due to bunches of little hairs with ends just 100 to 200 nanometres across – sufficiently small that atomic interactions between the ends of the hairs and the surface come into play.

“We’ve borrowed techniques from the microelectronics industry to make our own footpad terminators,” said Michael Henrey from the University’s School of Engineering Science. “Technical limitations mean these are around 100 times larger than a gecko’s hairs, but they are sufficient to support our robot’s weight.”

Interested in assessing the adhesive’s suitability for space, Henrey tested it in ESA’s Electrical Materials and Process Labs, based in the Agency’s ESTEC technical centre in Noordwijk, the Netherlands, with additional support from ESA’s Automation and Robotics Lab.

“The reason we’re interested in dry adhesives is that other adhesive methods wouldn’t suit the space environment,” he said. “Scotch, duct or pressure-sensitive tape would collect dust, reducing their stickiness over time. They would also give off fumes in vacuum conditions, which is a big no-no because it might affect delicate spacecraft systems.

The researchers subjected the ‘dry adhesive’ materials to space vacuum and temperatures and found that the stickiness is retained throughout.

“A depth-sensing indentation instrument was used inside a vacuum chamber to precisely assess the dry adhesive’s sticking performance,” said ESA’s Laurent Pambaguian. “Experimental success means deployment in space might one day be possible.”

“It’s very expensive to upgrade hardware once it is up in space so the idea would be to fly a more general robot in the first place,” Henrey said. “This could then be adapted through software upgrades for different tasks that weren’t anticipated at the start of the project.

“Our Abigaille climbing robot is therefore quite dexterous, with six legs each having four degrees of freedom, so it should be handle environments that a wheeled robot could not. For example, it can transition from the vertical to horizontal, which might be useful for going around a satellite or overcoming obstacles on the way.”

Robotic wall-crawling is limited to relatively smooth man-made surfaces for now, with research continuing to improve performance.

The cooperation took place through ESA’s Networking/Partnering Initiative, which supports work carried out by universities and research institutes on advanced technologies with potential space applications.